If you were running the boat for the first one when does that hold for you oh yeah so i got a job, well two things we used to fly into lakes in misty fjord like when you were a kid yeah i won't because my dad my parents had an air taxi business we're villa flying down here in the waterfront the villa was yours it was my folks well they bought it from another guy anyway and they had This is in the. Uh, I was born in 67.
So approximately this time, state's a new state relatively, only about 10 years old. And they were like, how do we, um, how do we, uh, uh, encourage tourism? So my dad built a chalet on humpback lake. So we would fly into that lake in the early seventies and then there were skiffs there and you would troll for trout or go around the lake. So that's the first memories of being in a boat. But later on when I became- What kind of boats and how did you get the boats
in there? They'd fly them in there. You know, those little aluminum boats like we have now. I don't think they were Lund skiffs, but they were some form of a skiff. Did you have to install them there?
So I was so young, I don't remember the logistics of any of that, but you know, like modern day, all these lakes that have forest service cabins, there's some kind of a, and flying a boat on a plane is really not a good thing there is a whole risk assessment in that because it creates a you know it's drag it's also something that catches wind and so you have to really pick your weather and know what the hell you're doing but but later on when i was a teen early teens i
started working for silver lining down here which is no longer called silver lining it's called went to norcast and it was bought by trident so on and so forth but anyway one of the things they had was they didn't have a fish waste disposal grinder system set up so every night after they processed fish it would take all the fish heads and guts and big totes and they were lower them into this big huge aluminum flat water water boat and my job was to run this boat out behind.
Pennock island and shovel all this salmon gurry and then dump these totes over the side a horrible work yeah but because i got to drive the skiff i thought i was the coolest guy on the planet i just loved it here and i get to run around in the skip even though i'm covered in fish blood guts but it was fun but the one thing i learned early on okay so you know i don't i'm running i'm getting all the water out because of course it rains and fills up water so you
pull the plug and you run the boat full speed and the water drains out the plug right do you have like a boston whaler some fiberglass thing no this was this big flat water boat like what was it made of was it aluminum so it'd be like a big river skiff but bigger i may maybe it was something like a, commercially built one maybe even out of aluminum i don't remember the brand or anything but It had a big, it had a 25 tiller and I'm running it down the harbor here and hit a log. Oh.
And the, you know, it kicks. Time to do. Like evening, night? Yeah, it was afternoon, you know, whatever. Kicks the skiff up. It throws me to the corner of the skiff and the throttle is locked. You know, it was probably spring loaded, but either it was old or whatever. So here I am now pinned.
The boat's doing. And so I'm learning the first lesson as a teenager of what not to do, you know, of course I was able to crawl my way back to the tiller and throttle down and go, oh, thank God I'm, I didn't get thrown from the boat, but early, no, I had no vision of that scenario playing in my head. Yeah. You know, as a, as a early boater, but. And they probably didn't have the kill switch. Yeah. No, no, there was no lanyards. None of that sort of stuff.
I think all that came because of this. Because of Larry Jackson. No, not, yeah. Or you can trace it back to some kid in a skiff. No, I'm sure this had happened probably outside of my scenario there. When I was in high school, or no, I was middle school, maybe even elementary school. At some point, there was a guy that was building a log house next to ours in Cloak. And one of the guys who was working on the house would take a skiff out and would set crab pots at the head of the fae. Right.
And I remember I heard first from someone else that one of the, he had, he had died or something like that. He'd been out there checking the crab pots. They'd found the skiff just going in circles around. It was the same sort of thing. He was probably lived in the crab pot, something he slipped, fell off a board or whatever, and then couldn't get back to the skiff or used all of his energy trying to get back to it. So I remember like looking out into the bay and just thinking,
man, crazy. You could die right there in front of your house. Yeah, I saw some boats that were out there. We bought a used boat when we first moved up, and it was just a piece of junk. Of course. My dad was used to, he had a pretty skookum set up for lakes in like Nebraska. Right. A nice fiberglass boat. Different deal. Trolling for walleye and whatnot. Just dialed in. Comes up here and buys something. We just had a lot of mistakes, a lot of just misery.
So it came with one of those little seven foot sport yaks that goes on top yeah yeah so we had one of those in case of emergency and i thought this is going to be horrible so there are a couple times where the main died and it was an inboard so they it was just terrible so we're using the kicker to come back in just putting back in and it's taking hours and hours i'm just thinking there's kind of this thing sinks like we're not all fitting in the sport yak
like how this is yeah so you were doing this is as a teen you're doing some risk assessment in your head yeah the The first, the first stuff, the, with the boat was when we first moved up. And so, you know, elementary school, and then the guy passed away, checking the crab pods when I was around middle school. And so I was, I had all of those memories in my head when I'm working at the fish hatchery, running the skiff to the net pens and back, like, you just collect these things throughout.
Right. So what provoked this thought for me, it was of course, commercial fishing for of these years, you and I are chatting, you know, about ideas and so forth. And I, two things, you have a baby now. And so your risk assessment is going to change. It did for me. I go out in my boats with my family now, and in the back of my mind, I have a disaster plan. And maybe it's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing. If there's a fire, what am I going to do?
If we have a flooding what am i going to do so i always feel better if i have a a way off the boat into a. Another boat you know towing a skiff some kind of inflatable that's that's a that's a baseline but then as you do this risk assessment it just it seems like you learn through time that what narrows there or what what increases your i don't know if the right what's the right wording what increases your chances of survival is based on having these certain. Criteria balanced, shall we say.
So weather, of course, we're now these modern weather apps, you're constantly looking at that and you can always check the BHF for weather, but weather is the critical one, the condition of the boat, you know, how, how well is it maintained? You know, what is it capable of doing? And so then how far are you going to travel?
And so you and i don't know if i've ever actually i don't have like this checklist physical chestnut but i have a mental yourself crazy i think if you well yeah you could you could go crazy you'd never leave the dock and interestingly enough if you walk the docks in puget sound you find a lot of people that think they want to go to alaska in their trawl or whatever but never leave no and and there's some people that are just paralyzed by preparation,
and then there's the other people that, you know, just step onto a leaky whatever and off they go. So the other thing that provoked this thinking for me was just recently this commercial fishing boat sank. I don't know if you heard the story. Yeah, by a Huna. Yeah, it was the Icy Straits coming out of Juneau and going out to get their crab gear, I think, or no, their longline gear. So I knew the boat, the wind walker. It originally was in Petersburg. And I remember, I heard the name.
I'm like, wow, I wonder if that's the boat. So I went online and I found a picture of it. Sure enough, that boat, we had black cod tendered that boat. I did with another guy, Dan Castle and Tony Vincent. And we'd followed it all the way to Prince William Sound. This is in the late, mid, mid nineties. And it went up to the long line. We went up to take the black cod off. Well, we got in a storm anchored behind. This is a whole story that is related to this.
I guess I don't need to tell that story, but it is a whole nother risk story. But what happened with these guys with that sinking, I would assume that the boat capsized, which is the highest rate of fatality in commercial fishing. And so, okay, let's take their scenario. They went out, they're pushing, they're young, they're aggressive. They're in a good boat. The boat's, you know, a seasoned boat been around, like I said, for a long time.
But they went into some weather that was probably not advisable. And that place of the world, there's so much current, so much coming out of Linn Canal, Icy Straits, Chatham Straits. It's all meet and right where they think where they went down, icing conditions, so forth, middle of the night. So then I'm on a boat. I'm contrasting this to show you the difference in risks. in the mid-'90s. Perse Sainer going out of Petersburg on a salmon fishing,
trip. And we were heading from Petersburg up to Baranoff Island to fish at the hatchery called Hidden Falls, whatever. It's a beautiful Saturday morning. I mean, literally milled pond out. We're just north of Petersburg, about an hour, maybe a sockeye islands it's called. And the boat is untanked. It's high. And the autopilot feedback arm came disconnected. The boat went hard over, rolled on its side, slowly filled with water, and capsized. And we end up on the keel.
Okay, no one died. No one even got hurt. We're rescued within, you know, half hour. I think somebody comes along, finds us. Did you have, like, EPIRB was going out too? Well, here's an interesting thing that relates back to the Windwalker story. When a boat capsizes, the EPIRB and the RAF will not deploy because they're not deep enough.
They have what's called a hydrostatic release mechanism that only triggers when that raft gets to about, well, they can set them at different depths, but usually it's 40 or 60 feet. And so when it rolls over, the raft is only whatever, 10, 50 feet a walk. Yeah, or they can get caught on the boat too, but they're designed to self-deploy at a certain depth. Well, this wind walker could have rolled over and floated at the top in a raging storm. Yeah. No way to get to it. The raft never deploys.
Guys might have been trapped, you know, anywhere. And what we did was just, it was slow enough, calm enough, daylight. All these factors lead to, you know, us living happily ever after. And, but it's those conditions that changed, changed the deal, you know. So that's the same thing, I think, And even in recreational accidents, it's usually factors that cause the, the, the tragedy versus just,
you know, near mess. Yeah. Remember the first time I went out to Thorn Arm, I bought Sam Nelson's old 15 foot Boston Whaler. So that's a small, but nice, heavy fiberglass. You had that when I first met you. 15 footer. I'm going out Thorn Arm. It's a little bit exposed, but it's supposed to be really nice. So I trusted the weather, go out there and I go to Anchor. And I figured if it's going to be an 18 foot tide, I'm going to put out, you know, a couple extra feet.
And I just did the little ghost anchor, right? So you push it out and then yank on there. But I didn't have nearly enough scope. And I'm just like overnight, but it didn't even occur to me that I should be worried about it. All I thought was, because I have the anchor down, it's like a nice cove, but the angle that you need and the ratio of seven to one, like that wasn't in my brain. I'd never like looked up, well, how much do you need? I just figured I needed more than the tide.
Right but the more acute your angle is right how much chain you have on there chain you have on there so i figured wind yeah there's a lot of factors because i had a heavy anchor i just thought oh i find as long as i have enough it's not going to float the anchor but you can also get your wind drag and what the tide stuff can drag and all of a sudden if it drags far enough and then it goes to deeper water yeah and it didn't even occur to me did you have a line
running from the boat up to the bushes to at least yeah as a secondary line so secondary line yeah had that so it didn't drift off into oblivion no yeah and it when we woke up and looked at the it was right there it was fine yeah but it was only later that i thought oh my gosh there's that could have been real bad because if if it would have floated the anchor then it could have like hit some rocks somewhere else and all of a sudden i messed up you know what
so i think even though i have that line there but just a lot of things i didn't even know to ask about and so i'm going out there. And so I think that I'm being as safe and cautious as, you know, I checked the weather and I was very meticulous about that. And so you can run this program that you think is really good, but there's a flaw in the system. Have you read Deed Survival by Lawrence Gonzalez? No, but sounds good. He talks about the, you run a system and you think your system is good.
As long as you pay attention to your system, you're fine. But there could be a flaw in the system that gets revealed at the worst possible moment. So you have like your mental checklist, but there's something, and he equates it to, there's like different disasters and people do things, they think everything they're doing right, but a practical application, it's like you're all in one, like GPS, emergency, everything. So that's all great, it's in one thing, but if that one thing dies.
You're in trouble. So if you can't navigate, if you don't know where you're at, if you don't, you know how to get things safe, you don't know how to communicate. If you don't know how to like everything, you can navigate and you can move and you can call for help as long as that one thing doesn't break. It's, it's, it's your all in one, but without it. And so I think I'm totally safe because I spent $500 on this thing. That's my compass. That's my locator. That's my GPS.
But if it goes down. But yeah, if you dropped over the side. Do you have any skills to be able to. Yeah. Right. Well, they say that now, I think, a little, I mean, these are just anecdotal stories of people depending on their cell phones. Yeah. And then they walk into a no cell phone ravine or whatever, and then that doesn't work and so on. So, you know, that kind of leads to a kind of false sense of security, if that's the right word.
But I think, so you're talking about a situation where you're a new boater, and so your ignorance can lead to the problem. But I find now I'm on the other side of that, not, I've been around it commercially, chartered professionally, in skiffs so much, but that, that you get too comfortable. And a, a small story about that here about two falls ago, my nephew is getting married and he wants some beach water.
Beachwood for his wedding ceremony so we go out on a beautiful calm calm evening for it's gonna get dark at six something to that effect and we're just gonna go zip around betton island and run up to the high tide line and look for little sticks and stuff for this so we get back and i'm doing that we run up two seconds up to the high tide line search around nothing we're making our way around we get to the tatush area and we're at this big beach that we've been to many times
spent many times a lot of time there it's you know shallow tide's going out but i'd misread the tide book and i i don't know if i assumed that we had a little bit more time than we did i went up oh i found some things and i turn around and now the skiff is it's in the mud, it's not going to get i'm not going to beat it pushing as much as i could i finally i realized oh yeah we ain't making this we're now at low tide we're stuck in the skiff we're at a we're safe but now
the so i call have one bar call leslie hey we're we're we're not going to make it back we're gonna have to wait for the tide to go all the way out and come back in but that's not the particularly the risky part right now we're fine everything we're just on the beach It's a fall day. It's kind of cool, but it's not windy. It's not rainy. It's that I'd never planned to return in the dark. So now finally the tide comes back in. I got nothing on this boat.
I don't even think I have a flashlight. I don't have a headlamp, but I got nothing. And now I'm thinking, okay, we just have to get from here to Knudson Cove. It's a 15-minute skiff ride. But if I hit something, we're not. But if the wind starts blowing, the whole risk changed because of one silly thing that I just was casual about. Oh, we're just going to zip around this island in a skiff, you know, in a beautiful day. But not probably not a good risk assessment.
No. From my point of view. Did you stay the night or did you? No, we did make it. But on the way back, I was more worried than I pretended to be. You know, I, I pretend like this is just normal. We're just cruising along here. We have to keep it together. Yeah. If you start getting paranoid. Yeah. But you're like, God, I hope we don't hit anything. Yeah. I hope the wind doesn't increase more than it is right now. Yeah. You know.
That's a pretty short run, like you said. And so it's like, and you've been around there a lot. So it's. Yeah, you know the way. And you have the lights. But, but, but that's, but that's where I think that's what gets you. Yeah. Yeah. Is that you think I got this in the bag. It's a little, it's an overconfidence deal. And it's not that far where, you know, it's, we've done it a hundred times.
You know adventure survival that we talk a lot about disaster and obviously boats and whatnot and things that happen in alaska and so i'm very careful not to judge like we don't want to say oh this guy's just total idiot yeah because it's like a reserve rewrite we're just going to analyze when we're talking well even in book club we did the elf ro right and that was a a modified container ship right that was dangerous and had just gotten away with it for so long and then the conditions
had changed and all of a sudden you different the model shows up later they make this decision to plow through it they guess based on their experience they make the call and it ends up being tragic right perfect storm same thing you have a modified boat right that was a little bit more top heavy right probably wouldn't have mattered given the conditions but you trust the captain he's a good captain he's doing it for so long and then we see it in alaska too the other hundred times you never hear
about the story a hundred percent because it's like you don't either you don't know the problem that was revealed or they kind of got away with it and that's.
That happens a lot especially in alaska like the crabbing crabbing was so stinking dangerous and then increased regulations but a lot of the boats were modified boats the arctic rose was a i think it was a tender that was then retrofitted for crab gear all right so and you talked about the icing too so you get the ice on there and then it flips it's the thing they did there that the made the most difference was they went to ifq standard not a which means that they gave them
a little bit more leeway to fish when the weather was better whereas it used to be this basically shootout everybody's out there you got this four weeks to catch this crab what no matter what the weather is so i think that's helped bring that fatality thing down was that late 70s early no Oh, no, that was a lot later than that.
I think it was in the nineties when they finally went to this or even the two thousands where they went away from the crew and it was basically more resource driven and safety driven, but, um.
The thing we talk one of the other things that i heard in one of your podcasts is your your buddy's doing the alpine hunt and the whole time i'm listening to that i'm thinking these guys are having just this epic beautiful adventure you know but what had happened if one of them you know, broke an angle yeah yeah you know you don't even want to talk about it but yeah but isn't that one of the risks you know you think well it's and i'm older now not as stable on my feet and you're carrying
things so that weight is adding to the forces that are involved and i'm not a big hunter i'm not even an off trail kind of guy but all i can think about is these little scenarios.
Where if you break an ankle or you know whatever i heard this case one time where you know a guy got cut commercial fishing but it was just the bacteria in that particular cut he almost lost his hand i'd get i've had hundreds of cuts and you think oh you just take care of that you know whatever on you go but that one cut yeah well the risk assessment if we look back ketchikan 100 years ago 150 years ago when you're coming up here to try to get your riches in
the gold fields like the amount of people who got to catch can like yeah that's it man this is as far as i'm going or they get to do like it's not for me or get to skagway and then you have to go up the trail don't even make it to the gold fields because you don't make it up chilcoot pass there's an avalanche or once you get to the top of chilcoot pass you have to build your boat and then you have to float down the river so then you like you you you
die you pass away and on the float down so you didn't even make it so like the fact that you've made it all that way just to not make it on the boat right down then you get to dawson. And then there's no claims for you, or you don't get any gold. Or you make a little bit of money, and then you get back to Skagway, and then you're on the Princess Sophia, and you hit a reef, and you're on the reef for, what was it, like 24 hours or something like that?
Yeah, and I think there were guys on there that had made money and then died in a stupid... And it was the last boat of the season. Yeah. And there's other boats around that, and this is what, 1913, 14, 16, something like that.
And they're on the reef outside of Juneau. not very far yeah and there are other boats that are around but they can't try and rescue it because the weather's too bad rough yeah everyone's on there's like they're writing letters because we might not make it they're on this reef and then that's how you go down it's unbelievable so like now it's i don't know what the safe thing like you want to you want to be safe you don't want to over assess things in that book deep survival the
guy talks to a nasa scientist it was shortly after the columbia disaster and the guy said shit happens if shit couldn't happen then no one's going to be doing anything very interesting and it's it's kind of dark humor maybe kind of cold but it's you yeah if you're paralyzed by food you're not going to do anything if you're so terrified of well that talk about parenting if i'm so terrified of.
Abduction or of whatever then my kid's never gonna be out of my sight you know just trusting the kids to you want your kids to be able to kayak around you know what if they're kayaking around and there's a like the amount of what ifs it's it's yeah we used to go out and camp on the islands like back island and you know as teenagers and i think back now i'm thinking yeah my folks just let me go do all this but i had boating experience but you know
there's still teenagers doing dumb things you know we're water skiing we're you know i have we have fires like isn't it oh yeah it was a great way yeah you got to experience this you know life too and you know most people we didn't really have any accidents maybe a cut from a knife here or there but you know but it was definitely a cut from the knife but it was not that bad and i don't know you know it's almost like actually if.
You're too protective then you don't give kids the skills to assess danger yeah they got to be able to go out there and say well this looks pretty bad to me yeah i remember we tried to i don't you ever read the book papillon about the the guy it's it was a movie too it's where the french he was a french convict and they put him on these penal colonies this is off the coast of i think south america or something they put you on an island and they say okay well that's
your you live so he's living on his island and he decides to escape and he's been watching the surfs and he realizes that every seventh wave that's a small wave and then the toe will take you out past the reef so it's the seven wave theory you know so here we are as teenagers You're sorry. South independent island. We can see the houses right here. We're just camping there. The southeast had come up. There was a shore break. We had the boat up high
and dry fine. Okay, hey, we're going to take the seventh away. We didn't even look. Yeah, I think it's the seventh one. Oh, gosh. Swamp the skiff. Yeah. Everything floats back to the beach in a big wet mess, you know. Nobody's hurt. Nothing happens, you know, tragically. But it's teenagers making dumb mistakes that didn't hurt anybody. Yeah. But if we look historically, culturally, how many rites of passage are tied to physical challenges and potentially dangerous challenges?
And as an important way of proving that you have what it takes, it's going to be okay. There's going to be inherent risk with life, and you're going to have to be able to have the fortitude to make it through. So whether it's the living on your own for a week or your quest or your first hunt or whatever it is. It's been part of the cultures. And so now without that same sort of cultural structure, it's more just kind of whatever you feel like doing.
And so you're rather than a mentor guiding you in the ways of this is you are now prepared to go on your quest. It's like, hey, we're going to go camping. Well, nowadays, the modern equivalent would be getting your driver's license. You know, you have to actually. If they do, CE kids are not getting their driver's license, which is wild.
More so down south. But yeah, it's crazy. My bigger fear, just from a logical risk point of view with my family, was going out on the boat, it was high, but driving. And even on our road that I drive so many times, I'm like, all it takes is that one person come in the other direction to be distracted for a moment, to swerve across and hit me, T-bone me, and kill my whole family.
Really. It's super dark. It is dark, but that's the true, you know, know i think 45 000 people a year die on highways in in america and so we went to on a recent trip to moab we flew into salt lake city and we drove from salt lake down to moab which is about a four hour drive and before we left ketch can i said the most risky part of this trip is going to be driving from salt lake city did you announce that to the family no i kept this all to myself because i looked at the wrap
and route and i realized it's a two-way road most of the way and And so you're gonna be in these, and I can be, that said, it's a self-assessment thing. I'm a distracted driver. I'm a distracted driver. I love to see what's going on around me. I'm like a puppy, what's going on over there. And so I'm driving on that trip and I'm mentally telling myself, do not turn and talk to your child. When they talk to you. Because, I mean, my instinct is to look at the person I'm talking to. Yeah.
You know? And we went past the airport on the way out of Moab, and there are skydivers coming down. Yeah. Which we don't see much. My kids are like, what's that? What? I'm driving. I'm like, I can't look, but I think it's skydivers. Yeah.
So, I don't know. I think it's a parent thing that you get a little bit more, your surveillance level gets a little higher but then you don't want to not encourage risk like that same it might not i talk about this a lot in the adventure survival lit so it's not literally hiking mount everest for some kids their mount everest is going to be leaving ketchikan because it's not a challenge a physical challenge where there's going to be cold it's going to be do i have what it
takes to survive outside of ketchikan i'm scared of college i'm scared of leaving my home i'm scared of all that so it's you might like your future might suffer or your future might be sacrificed because you end up staying and there's some people who have exceptional lives here and they're happy and content everything's fine but some kids need to get out and explore then maybe come back as professionals or come back on their own terms but that being too
scared to follow through with college or training or like that's a that's a huge fear too as a teacher when you're talking to the students and and kind of trying to paint a picture at times of what could be do you find that the you know the modern teenager is lacking a quest for adventure outdoors or otherwise or are they just normal what have you seen it's it's hard to tell I taught in California for ten years and And you're on the road system.
So if you stay in Manteca and you live with your parents a little bit or get an apartment, there's more apartments, there's more housing. So you can get some buddies and a roommate, like move out and then drive to different towns for your job. So I'm staying here. It's kind of close. It's fairly safe. I'm going to a junior college for two years. And again, you can drive 15 minutes to it or it's a half hour drive.
So that sort of bridging from maybe if they were hesitant to go to a four-year university or move somewhere else, there's this definite viable secondary option where you stay close to home, it's not as risky, and you can still get out and get some training. Here, I think there's, it's harder to get some kids out of catch. You can't go anywhere else. You can't drive anywhere else. So you're so limited by mostly seasonal jobs here. But is their imagination limited?
I mean, are they limited by what could be? If they, I just, I just, I was talking to Leslie about this. I grew up here, of course. College prep would have taken your class if you were teaching it, you know, all the English stuff. But I had a very limited idea, and I don't know if this is a teen's thing in general, of what was possible in life.
And I'd never heard, you know, like, I just read a book called The Journey's North, which is all about a group of people hiking the Pacific Crest Trail over the course of one season. Well told story. I didn't know that it even existed. Yeah, I think going back to the kids leaving Ketchikan, I think they see so many people who are so successful and happy in Ketchikan that they might not see the reason to leave. Like, well, my parents, you know, they all came back.
And so rather than go down to college and accrue a bunch of debt, I'll just stay here and I'll save a bunch of money.
It's like well you're not going to be in the same you're going to be maybe more dependent on the parents rather than go down to call go down to college or two-year or trade school aviation school whatever it is and then come back and you can be on the different end of that i think that ends up being they can say that they're saving money but it could be more of a fear thing it's a risk thing because no one's going to know me i don't have this the friend protection i don't have the family
protection so i think some kids might be it's tougher to get them out because, they might be some kids they're in a little bit of a bubble maybe you're saying and then there are kids that you know got kids at clemson we got kids at harvard we've had kids back east and yeah let's just go for it but let's say this outdoor adventure thing because we're kind of in what we would call an outdoorsy place but do people talk about you know like your friend dave
he went off for the Peace Corps and was off in Uzbekistan, I believe, one of them. You know, off in some rural place. I mean, that's an adventure. Yeah. You know, even traveling overseas is a little, it's cheaper these days. It's, I think, easier to do.
But I guess I just never got painted, even though I was flying around in a 185 when I was four years old and going to these remote places and doing this cool stuff and then commercial fishing i never, really thought about you know there's friends that i know that have trekked all over tibet yeah.
Yeah i don't i think some of that stuff doesn't my parents made me or we would always go down to colorado during the summers just so that i wasn't intimidated by the big world so when it was time to graduate and leave i wasn't scared which i'm grateful for it was cool to i went to a gifted and talented camp in colorado when i was in middle school and first two years of high school so meeting down south kids and you know getting acclimated to that or adapted
to that so college was going to be easier but i think there's a you kind of create a bubble based on experiences and so you've seen i've seen some america and we did road trips to san diego okay this is all cool but it doesn't necessarily open up i didn't really have the opportunity to go to uzbekistan or right or i wasn't in you get tuned into these stations or you meet someone who did a study abroad yeah and all of a sudden i was like oh that seems pretty interesting i didn't
have i had you know middle-class friends who were successful and happy, but they weren't like doing things like that. Grand adventures. Wasn't in my same frequency. We were curious about some stuff and a couple of years after college, some friends went to Australia, but for the most part, their adventure was coming to Alaska during the summer to visit me. Yeah. Right. And then when you went to California, you did a bunch of fishing.
Yeah. Later on, you got, when you had a little bit of money, maybe time or whatever, you were able to get out and see some of the outdoors in different places. Yeah. I actually wrote about this from my last column for the Juno Empire about, I got a spam email, well not a spam, but a marketing email saying, what are your fishing goals for 2025? And it was an advertisement for a lodge in Bristol Bay. And so it's, with social media now, we get to compare ourselves to all the angling opportunities.
Rather than I grew up fishing and it was fun. I love fishing.
I can't wait to fish and own the Kings again, own the Silvers and maybe try Silvers on the fly from my skiff sure you look at social media and you see well you know there's there's trout in patagonia there's brown trout in australia yeah there's tame and in mongolia so all you know bonefish in belize you start to look at all these other opportunities and it's like man should that be my goal like what what am i should i compare myself against like this adventuresome angler that
needs to do all these things so if i love to fly fish does it mean i don't really actually love to fly fish if i don't go to bristol bay i'm an alaskan i haven't been to bristol bay yet you know that makes me a bad alaska like why have i not gone there but it's like eighteen thousand dollars for two people for yeah right it's just not even practical right right i i like to tell this story you know sometimes you take for granted well let's not say sometimes.
You you take for granted usually where you grow up and i took for granted growing up here and I illustrate this by my folks were from Montana they moved here in 59 my mom was from the year of statehood yeah they came out statehood and they. My mom grew up in Ennis, Montana, which is on the Madison River. My dad grew up in Norse, about 25 miles away on a ranch. Anyway, so when we would go back to see my mom's family in Ennis.
Her house that she grew up in, you can stand in the front yard in about 25, I think maybe it's 50 to 100-yard walk, and you're on the Madison River. You can see it flowing by. I never once fished in the Madison River as a child growing up. We would go to they would stalk the pond in the city park for numbskulls like us but here's the contrast we were flying into a remote lake a back lake to stay in our debt our private chalet.
And catch cutthroat till the cows come home yeah it was like why would we go wait around or drift down this i didn't fly fishing at the time wasn't quite it was still a thing but it was this is in the seventies wasn't nearly what it is now. And so I don't think I ever wet a fly on the massive river or a spinning rod, anything.
Well, the frame of reference changed before it was, you know, you'd catch fish for the sake of catching fish and travel angling was for the elitist types and then fly fishing made it that much more difficult. So like, why would you even do that?
I think Patagonia trout was, they were stocked in the early 1900s and they were trying of get people to go there in like the 30s yeah but obviously people have other stuff to do in the 30s and 40s and it's harder to get to probably back then yeah so then once you start getting more of the wealthy people with the fly rods it's the proper way to do things right then that kind of goes out and then you had a river runs through it in the 90s yeah right and more of the trout
bum type and then do other things but the purest kind of thinking yeah but at the time like, Madison River who cares yeah yeah I mean so, that's the taking for granted you know. I don't know, we're way, way off the risk theme here, but whatever. No, I think that ties it perfectly into it, like to come full circle, because if you don't, if you don't, if you don't have a boat here in Southeast, you know, what are you doing?
Yeah. You kind of have to have a skiff to have some level of adventures, whatever you're comfortable in. Right. Like if it's anything above eight knots, not going out, 10 knots, okay, that's your risk assessment. Like you're going to miss out on a lot of days. You know, if you need to check the shrimp pods, crab pods, are you going to fish deep? Are you going to have more, you're going to go to the little bit further for all these things?
Like that's all ties into what, how you want to live this experience. Yeah i that key is a story where you know i rent these big boats we've talked about those before and i haven't had any problems with people having accidents until last year and it was the same thing it was a very new couple to boating and a very experienced boat and the one couple got.
So you know they were really wanted to do this trip with around the island so they did so they're in and out of the fjords which literally you know i told myself i was not going to say that word literally it irritates the academy yeah they're so comfortable because everything's so deep here, so they get so used to that that then they get they make a mistake and drive over a rock and damage the boat the other couple was fishing around the rock
where'd they hit the rock up down at point Alba and, and they just made a bad call. And it was completely, it was a, it was on the chart and everything. They just tried to go around something and they were used to scooting by the, the shallow part of the water. And here, you know how it is in one hour, there's, you can't see a rock and the next hour the thing is exposed, the tide just like, but if you're in the fjords, it's 3000 feet of water, you know, right at the wall, you know? Yeah. So.
So what happened to the boat? Like, oh, they just damaged the keel and then you, They ran up on a rock and just kind of scraped, scraped the keel, didn't damage the props or anything, backed it off. They're all frantic thinking they were sinking. This, nothing happened, didn't damage anything. They were able to come home. They were in the last day of their trip anyway. So far it wasn't even, it wasn't even that relatively expensive damage.
And then the other couple were fishing around a rock pile, drifted off the rock and then went to drive back to the rock.
And hit a rock hit you know because underwater you could drift over it and it's fine but yeah 10 feet that way there's a pinnacle and so they went over that and they did more damage on that accident but different scenarios and and and i i as the i tried to not make them feel they of course are mortified they've done this damage to your boat and you're like you know whatever we're going to fix it nobody's my first line is nobody's hurt nobody's hurt it's just it's just
equipment it's just money yeah it's your money but so you think it's better to not talk about it or talk about it because sometimes it can seem like you're jinxing it or it's very morose or very very dark and certain things you don't want to say and other times it's if you don't talk about it are you pretending that it doesn't exist well the first thing i go in on when i'm checking a boat out is here i'm talking about like you like you your
personal philosophy be about risk do you like talking about it and thinking about all these sort of things or are you worried that you're going to get in your own head and you're going to maybe back away from it because i guess you're kind of like you said on the other end of it now you know you you say that and it makes me feel bad because i don't you know where is it that you always do a safety, airplane do you get in a float plane the other guy will go but maybe i'm gonna
flip about and does the safety briefing, you go in some places, the safety briefing is very formal. A commercial jetliner every time. But I jump on my boats every, now I'm very emphatic about children in life jackets. They can't go down to our dock without a life jacket on. I've had both my kids go in the water, getting on and off boats.
And in both cases, I was right there to grab them back up, but they go down and hit their head or they go into the dock, the current's moving, current scares me. But that said, the reason I'm feeling bad because of your question is I don't do a formal safety briefing with my kids. I think they expect if there's a disaster, I'm going to run the show. And that may not be the case. What if I fell over? You know, they need to get back to me or stop the boat.
You know so you're yeah it makes me think i need to probably prep my family better abby and i were heading up to traders in my in the whaler so 15 foot and we're going around by indian point, and of course the weather was a little bit off it doesn't take much for it to be off and all of a sudden and i'm you're not going completely with it you got to make a little bit of a turn as you're coming out by luring yeah and i am just looking and there's like so a little free board on this thing.
Cause those way, the whaler, there's hardly anything in the back there. And I, so she's grabbing on and the boat is so small as she can drag, grab the rail on the right side and the left side. And she's sitting right in front of me and she, she's like a, you know, adventure type person. So I figured she's having fun, but I said, okay, if, if, if, you know, there was a little bit of water that was on there and we kind of sprayed a little bit.
And so i said if i have to bail you know grab the wheel and just keep us going you know because if you end up getting perpendicular to the waves that's when you can start taking them on you got to be going yeah into this wall so i'm like giving giving her this briefing.
While we're underway while we're kind of in it and it made me think oh that's a that's a good that's that's probably something that i didn't think about it you're just i'm in charge like i'm doing this like she's trusting in me to to get there and we did we had we had a we had shrimp pot on there we had two shrimp pots crap pots, Yeah, it was just going to be a quick trip up there. Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh.
I think now that you say that, it seems like the Coast Guard says this, people don't, I don't know if it's that they're embarrassed, because I used to do one every day with the charter. You would do a quick, hey, the life jackets are here, fire extinguishers are there, VHF is there, and so forth.
Now i knew i was going to be inside of other boats and probably within 100 yards of the beach the whole time limited need for but sometimes you get in a roll and old people fall yeah that's your bigger risk probably but i did have a fire at one time we had to get everybody off the boat.
Um and you know there's been a few collisions out in that country with all these fast boat moving rental boats recently so um yeah i i think you're you're i can learn something from this, discussion that i probably need to be more formal about it with friends and family versus you know i was formal about it with clients and i still am with my when i rent a boat first thing i do is go over every safety component of the boat and then i also will explicitly tell them
do not try to save this boat it sounds crazy yeah i mean if this boat is on fire or sinking your duty is to be safe not save this 25 000 piece of shit boat yeah exactly and some of them are like oh yeah whatever you know and they don't think anything is going to happen but you know i i think if you can get away with the out people getting hurt then you're doing pretty good a little damage i was had a podcast with steve cam i was asking the difference between now and then and now he's
in that mentorship role and he said that. What he tries to impress upon the kids or the younger pilots is that you don't have to impress anybody. Don't try to impress everybody. And I think that's what, there's a difference between the people who are adventurous because that's what their risk is. Like Alex Honnold, who does the free soloing stuff. He's like, it's just, it's, he says, why take those risks? He says, that's a stupid question.
Like, it's just, this is just who I am. And I don't know who it was, but one of the first with the big alpinist guys was like if if death wasn't a possibility then life would be kindergarten and like that's that's some people's mindset and then there are people who take that and kind of try to prove to other people just how how much they're willing to push the limits and there's a difference when you can kind of this is about me versus i'm trying to impress someone else
and putting other people in at risk too and i think that's a huge element too, this is a risk I'm willing to take for me versus this is a risk and other people are at stake. And I think we see that a lot where, when you're a commercial fisherman, when you're like, you have to push in order to fish. Yeah. But also safety is the number one thing. And I think there's a huge respect and people understand the consequences and they. Are only taking risks that they feel are, are acceptable type risks.
And it's when things get outside of it, it's not that they were intentionally looking for something stupid or that they were irresponsible. It's just sometimes the weather's a little bit wrong, something, and it just happens. So it's, it's not a blame thing. It's just, uh, it happens. Accidents happen. And that's just part of the being out there. You know, we, I talked to you about this before, but in one of these podcasts, I, They talked about, you know, humans, mammals.
We evolved with a certain amount of risk just to survive. We formed communities to defend predators. We went out. So we have a certain amount of risk assessment built into our DNA.
But i think the thing that i wanted to that occurred to me is that we didn't have the risk of running at 25 knots in a four-foot chop in our dna or flying an airplane at 150 miles an hour through a mountain pass it's just not yeah in our dna or climbing a mountain in the ice and snow that's just because it's there it's not a it's not like we're not good at those things so you have to kind of step back and say okay i'm doing something that i'm not programmed to do yeah so i'm going
to have to assess that risk a little differently you know or be cautious yeah the when you look back at like what the fishing was like 300 years ago the natives weren't like rowing out to shakin to fish you know like they could get the halibut right they wouldn't come to the creek it was yeah why would you do that you didn't have to do that it's an energy expenditure but the amount of people who came up to those like
those early pilots oh unbelievable yeah the stories of uh granted things were going a lot slower. Like all of the icons in Alaska aviation have stories about crashing and walking 60 miles back to Fairbanks. Yeah. Right. Or, you know, just absolutely crazy. Well, it's all the books we've read for book club about these earlier, you know, sailing ship from whaling to exploration to so forth, you know, often they died, but actually they died mostly from scurvy and illness. Yeah. Yeah.
That was what you had to survive. Yeah. That's what makes endurance so unbelievable that they all live how how's and that when you're reading the book and it's how we we hiked up to the top of this mountain and then oh it was the wrong valley and so we slipped down what are you talking about yeah and then just in these the however much that wet wool weighed like what are you talking about that boat that they put together to get out of there where they had to enclose the top and then they sailed
in open ocean for whatever 500 miles to see if they could hit to hit this perfect spot out in the middle of nowhere yeah and they hit it and then they left those guys there and they all live yes but maybe and we think well they just made people differently but i think they were they were of course see acclimatized they were also more physical in nature we're more sedentary we're driving around in our nice heated cars most of the time yeah there's a lot of risk we don't
have to take no and there's no real point in inviting Unless you're just one of these crazy people that likes to do really kind of unique adventures and there are those people. Yeah. I just finished a great book called The Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko. He looked at Emerald Mile and he and another guy walk the, and they do it to highlight the problems with the Grand Canyon and development and so forth. But they walk from the north entrance to the park, the length of the area.
Parallel to the river not like a transect we're talking and it's an epic journey of misery you know but they're off to dig they try to do it off the couch as they say and it was complete failure they almost died yeah well the first guy that went down the colorado river yeah powell what had one arm yeah one arm yeah yeah lost in civil war yeah just like what am i gonna do now like i've been through the civil war so yeah i'm just gonna
take this river and just gonna float down it and see what happens yeah oh yeah yeah don't big deal anyway i highly recommend that walk in the park it's a great book yeah well that's good yeah it was a good episode yeah quality, yeah i turned it off 20 minutes ago larry oh by the way in closing you can you can rent a boat from larry if you want to and then don't you uh do their boat alaska is what it's called boat brokering too
right yeah that's my new moonlight profession through alaska boat brokers we got a few they have brokers all over the state it's kind of independent broker underneath this alaska boat brokers umbrella so i just work a few boats up in wrangle petersburg nice very good all right thanks man yeah thank you.